[FRIAM] Courtesy

[glen]

I'm torn, as usual. My favorite whipping post is "Bless her heart", a common insult from my neck of the woods. Being the dork that I am, I often miss the insults leveled my way. In many cases, the intention isn't to be rude but to poke fun in a socially constructive way.

To avoid focusing on the irony behind Nick's cartoon, I'll focus on a middle class shopper avoiding small, specific shops like butchers or tire shops and instead buying all their goods at Walmart (or Amazon). In order to really grok the moral of that condition, one has to unwind a LOT of tightly wound experiences. My inability to recognize when someone's making fun of me (either in a good- or ill-natured way) seems to have something to do with task switching.

It's always seemed to me the UK parliamentary "debates" involved more deeply layered rhetoric than our own punctuated discourse in Congress. My hypothesis here is: a facility with task switching allows one to parse those layers (seemingly) simultaneously. (To be clear, there is no such thing as multi-tasking. It's simulated through fast and fluid interleaving.)

Courtesy and civility can only be achieved by those who are capable of leveling criticism *within* the coarser layers of protocol. The rise of the "autism spectrum" in folk psychology is either causal *or* mostly a kind of laziness/efficiency/pragmatism ... a lack of facility for task switching.

A friend of mine is fond of saying "being poor is difficult" to indicate this generalized problem. Only relatively wealthy people have the resources to buy bread at the bakery, meat at the butcher, etc. The rest of us are so stressed and resource-poor (whether attention or whatever) that we *must* shop at Walmart or Amazon because we have no other option. We have to shave off every tiny bit of waste we can find just to stay sane (or survive).

And the ultra-wealthy *know* this. They spam us with bullshit (X/Twitter/LLMs), surround our cities with below-cost box stores to destroy businesses, destroy unions, lobby legislators up and down the spectrum, etc. They do this because they *know* we're resource poor. And we're approaching the point where none of us can afford to be courteous ... or at least we don't think we can afford it because our values and priorities have been so bent by the forcing structure they've trapped us in.

What to do? ... What to do.

On 3/18/25 10:25 AM, Santafe wrote:
> Your second link is a good read, Glen, and Olberding looks a bit interesting from her homepage.
> 
> In particular, her concern with courtesy as a functional and intentionally-maintained public good,
> logo-fb-cbabd21f2fe6fcea8fc92abf268d5a4f1a9be2e0736375b2df5995bbf17915fe.png
> Amy Olberding (University of Oklahoma) <https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-olberding?app=%22%3EAna>
> philpeople.org <https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-olberding?app=%22%3EAna>
> 
> <https://philpeople.org/profiles/amy-olberding?app=%22%3EAna>
> and her connection of it as one of the pillars of Confucianism, is one I have wanted to see made in scholarly work for a while.
> 
> Thanks for these,
> 
> Eric
> 
> 
> 
>> On Mar 18, 2025, at 9:53, glen <gepropella at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Irony is dead. That some of us literally put money into Sam Altman's bank account by generating completely useless cartoons lamely attempting to criticize Altman's friend Trump [⛤] is ... what? ... what is that? Hypocrisy? Stupidity? Suicide?
>>
>> I don't have the words. [⛧] It's tantamount to the Leopards Ate My Face (LAMF) meme. The latest is of course liberals snacking on scenes of Trump voters regretting their vote (Vets losing their jobs, wives being deported, threats to SSA, etc.). But the source of the meme is as old as time. People don't vote in their best interests, with their dollar or at the ballot box. And people who use GPT to generate political cartoons from which the target of the cartoons profit is canonical.
>>
>> I suppose you just can't stop people from shooting themselves in the foot. C'est la vie.
>>
>>
>> [⛤] https://www.businessinsider.com/sam-altman-hopes-donald-trump-build-new-ai-infrastructure-2025-1
>>
>> [⛧] For those of us who try to find words wherever we can, this may be interesting: https://linkprotect.cudasvc.com/url?a=https%3a%2f%2famysshadowbook.blogspot.com%2f2025%2f03%2fary-word.html&c=E,1,uf1PjNhQGYXt6eApisb5X8V3pACkTw2342Td_Sy3RRgsO3N7CpoBTd9582L_-lZ5y2WPmFC90kbBH_FAb8qfz7fXREyIo6K5khWzn2D7&typo=1
>>
>> On 3/17/25 5:30 PM, steve smith wrote:
>>> Nick:
>>> As you may know already, we are peas in a pod.   I remind everyone here gently from time to time in various ways to use their <delete> keys with my missives of questionable merit.
>>> As I age (grow more wise, more complex, more ??) I recognize that my ideations (too much encouraged/supplemented these days by my bar friend GPT) are perhaps "all over the place" relative to other's sensibilities.
>>> When I saw your (and George's) cartoon, I had a sense of "I guess I had to be there", which is why I offered you my parsing.... even though we all know that "a joke should never be explained"...
>>> I also know (from bits of feedback from various quarters) that fractions of my nonsense are parsed and appreciated but not (publicly) acknowledged.   I think you should continue (as you do) to share what you might, as you must...  even to deafening silence?
>>> :Steve
>>>> Steve, and others,
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for taking the meme idea seriously for a moment.   I have these moments of giddiness in which an idea just seems so good that the world must have it.   I actually imagined that my inbox would be full of copies of my own cartoon sent to me by people  who did not know its source. Crazy as a loon, I know it, but they are wonderful moments, and I could not write [live?] without them.  Narcissism Unbounded.   Thanks for playing along.
>>>>
>>>> Nick
>>>>
>>>> On Sun, Mar 16, 2025 at 3:18 PM steve smith <sasmyth at swcp.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>>>    It seems to me they haven’t this through so good. Thousands of NIH, NSF, and DOE funded scientists out on the international market.  Add to that reduced regulation on advanced scientific equipment and services.  Augment with a general sense of doom and self-interest and alienation from their country of origin.   Sounds like a recipe for foreign-based companies to scoop them up, if not other governments.   I won’t suggest particulars, but I think it is obvious how this could result in bad outcomes.
>>>>>
>>>>    My molecular biologist daughter is in the breach/sights of this nonsense.   She dedicated her career to 3rd-world focused virology (flavi like West Nile, Dingue, Zika) and is now faced with the triple-whammy of reduced funding/interest in third-world problems, reduced *health* funding, and the spirit that suggests as a woman in science she might somehow have gotten her funding through DEI biases.    She is not a candidate for "defecting" to China or Russia in this context but has been made crazy by watching her mid-career colleagues defect from academic research to profit-focused big pharma.   She got pulled off Flavi's to chase Coronas for a year or more because her institution had more  funding than they could spend and her funding was a little more fungible...    I think she can (probably) hang in there through the current storm (years) but not clear and it might actually be better for her (career) to move to a European Institution (though I don't know if that is
>>>>    even possible given what EricS suggested about demand/supply.
>>>>
>>>>    After the fall of the Soviet Union, I participated in a brief project reviewing US State Dept proposals by (former) Soviet scientists seeking an alternative to becomeing rogue nuclear scientists for who knows?    Seems like we are about to have our own problem of that nature?
>>>>
>> -- 
-- 
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